Thursday, April 23, 2009

House subcommittee holding hearing on addressable advertising privacy

The U.S. House Communications, Technology & Internet Subcommittee is holding hearings today focused on Internet and television viewers' privacy rights, specifically privacy when it comes to addressable advertising. With the advent of products like Google's behavioral-based AdWords web ads and the cable industry's Canoe venture, which aims to provide relevant, addressable advertising to cable television viewers. Testifying at today's hearing on behalf of the cable industry is NCTA President and CEO Kyle McSlarrow.

Its important to note that Canoe doesn't track usage habits to determine which ads are most relevant to display (like Google's AdWords). Canoe's addressable advertising technology delivers ads to groups of households based on third-party market research data. Here's Canoe's response to the congressional inquiry about user privacy.

"Community addressable messaging does not use deep packet inspection, personally identifiable information, nor set-top box data," said the company. "Cable subscribers already are notified about the general use of third-party demographic data via cable operator privacy notices. As we build a common foundation for advanced advertising capabilities that TV networks can use to make ads more relevant, useful and engaging for customers, all of our products are being developed with consumer privacy protection at the forefront."

It's important that in creating and implementing new technologies to deliver more relevant ads for users, that those users' privacy of personal information is respected. Canoe's ad-serving technology plans involve a process that is transparent to users and protects their private data.

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

When talking about privacy, there are three main issues:

* Who has access to the information?
* What is the information being used for?
* How can consumers control the use of that data?

Within that framework, for the first question, it's pretty clear that Canoe and the cable operators have no intention to sell the data to any third party or to use that data for anything other than advertising. All of the parties involved are clear on customer rights. Just as your credit card company has information and takes care not to give it to third parties, it is in the commercial as well as regulatory interest of these parties to keep this information confidential.

For the second question, "what is data used for?", the information is being used to deliver targeted advertising. Although there are some people who might feel "creepy" about this, in fact, this is a potentially valuable service. If we can make sure that a household with young children does not get advertising for Viagra, that's an actual service customers want. Rather than regulating against such advertisements, the technology being developed today has the potential to provide a better and more appropriate viewing experience.

The main area where regulation seems to make sense is in the issue of transparency and opting in/out of this kind of service. Customers should be aware that their data is being used to provide this service, and have the ability to opt out if they desire to do so.